


A New Kind of Medicine

by emeralddarkness



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Drabble, Gen, Post Series, Voluntary Controllers, a thought experiment, worldbuilding i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-18
Updated: 2018-02-18
Packaged: 2019-03-20 16:17:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13721406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emeralddarkness/pseuds/emeralddarkness
Summary: What about after the war?





	A New Kind of Medicine

The service was controversial, to say the least.

Many of the yeerks – hundreds, thousands, maybe millions – had decided to morph human and trap themselves; numbers were hard to judge because it was almost impossible to find any kind of census. (“For the safety of our new brothers and sisters” was the official explanation for the near total lack of public records. About half the people told this would say they never invited slugs into their family, which as supporters always pointed out _did_ prove the point.) Not all yeerks desired to wholly abandon their birth species like this, and many who refused were shipped back to their home world to live and die as deaf and blind slugs in puddles of ooze. In all likelihood, this would have been the fate of all nonconformists, had not a relative handful or so of voluntary hosts rallied, and managed to push through a request for an official infestation program. News of the requested program had been kept very quiet for the first while, but was eventually leaked, and was met with thunderous protest, and suddenly the few voluntary hosts that were left tried to fight the stigma and explain.

Yeerks were, some of them, evil, they admitted at rallies and on talk shows. Yeerks were, some of them, good. Yeerks were people exactly as much as Humans, Andalites, as any of the other thinking peoples of the galaxy. Most importantly, they could help.

The vast majority of people had been involuntary controllers, and their experiences had overwhelmingly been horrific; no one wished to devalue that in any way. Some yeerks, however, had not agreed with the aggressive conquest and invasion tactics that had been used by the former Empire – the so-called “Yeerk Peace Movement” was brought frequently as an example, with voluntary hosts coming forward and discussing their experiences. Some of these admitted that they had begun as involuntary, but gradually had come to understandings with their yeerks, had become friends. Some had been voluntary and one of the few who were lucky in their yeerk. Again and again the case was made – though infestation was not for everyone, those who wished should be able to form a fully consensual, symbiotic relationship. The right yeerk could be friend, companion, and even something that was almost medication for those with mental illness. If someone was suicidally depressed then they would have someone always there who could stop them from taking their life, and moreover someone who would understand completely everything they were going through, someone who could artificially trigger good memories to combat a negative spiral. If another heard voices, perhaps someone in their head could help them negotiate what was real and what was not, perhaps it could help combat it. In return for their service, the yeerks would have access to senses, to _life_ \- to a world of color and smell and sight and sound, to the ability to experience the world so much more fully, so much more richly. They would not have to abandon their identities, but they would not be relegated to a blind and deaf existence in a pool of sludge on a rock trillions of miles away. Surely, they said, providing such an option to another sentient species was the only moral thing to do.

Eventually, after much work, approval had been pushed through. A small population of yeerks, all of whom required visas and passports and who had to be registered and who had gone through rigorous testing, were allowed – though even with all the bureaucracy in place to select those to participate in the program it was only allowed because of one final failsafe; if kandrona access were limited, then the worse that could possibly happen to the human would be to be a slave for a handful of days if the yeerk refused to return, and waivers were required to be signed by all participants against that possibility. A small list of voluntary hosts, people who’d agree to give up autonomy in return for help with addiction, or crippling loneliness, or depression, or bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia , were selected and were tested as rigorously as the yeerks had been. Both groups took personality quizzes designed to find their closest match (the tests were based most heavily off of any number of online dating algorithms) and then were given opportunity to ‘talk’ with potential matches. The humans were fitted with subcutaneous gps trackers, “just in case”, and after a few final signatures they would be given the chance to be infested with the yeerk who had been chosen as the best match.

This final procedure took place in a small, quiet, sterile room, white and smelling faintly of disinfectant, with one yeerk pool in miniature next to a padded seat. The human was given one last chance to back out when they were offered a seat and instructed to rest their neck on the cushion at the edge of the pool before they lost any ability to make a true choice for as long as the yeerk was in their head. After all once infested the yeerk gained all the true power in the relationship; they were in control, and the human had only such power as was granted them by their yeerk.

The first time was always a test run and depending on the preference indicated in advance lasted somewhere between one and three days. After this they would return and separate again, with the yeerk releasing the host and returning to feed. Finally there was a post-exit exam, which included a twenty page questionnaire, which examined the behavior of the yeerk in detail. Had the host felt as though they were being enslaved, or as if they were being respected? Although the yeerk’s half was not so detailed – they’d already been given a chance to speak their mind with no way of being stopped while embodied – they were also asked a few follow-up questions about if the match seemed viable. After all, the goal was a partnership, and though nearly any body may have functioned as a slave, that wasn’t the idea.

Any yeerk who deviated in any regard from the program was removed from it immediately. 

If the match was deemed viable than a closely monitored partnership was, finally, initiated. Most, selected with such care, flourished. Some partnerships did not take, and the yeerk and host separated, either to look for new partners, or not. For the first six months paperwork was required every time the host and yeerk were separated and thus the host’s answers could be sure to be sincere, and even after then there was an open door for therapy and complaints or requests, and random questioning. The paperwork, some new applicants were told by happy, smiling controllers, was the worst part.


End file.
